Vollebak Cuts a Jacket From Thousands of Laser-Cut Slate Tiles

Experimental clothing brand Vollebak has unveiled a one-off jacket covered in thousands of half-centimetre-square pieces of slate.

The coat, named Rock Jacket, is the latest in a series of Vollebak designs that challenge conventional material choices in clothing. It follows jackets made from graphene, copper, American walnut and Dyneema — a fibre 15 times stronger than steel.

Vollebak describes the piece as a "sci-fi-style Harrington jacket". Its entire surface is covered in laser-cut slate tiles, each measuring five by five millimetres and half a millimetre thick, attached to a neoprene base layer.

According to Vollebak co-founder Nick Tidball, slate is the most ambitious material the brand has used for a jacket.

"Of all the materials that have never been used in clothing, rock might be the most radical," says Tidball.

"We're at the very start of this journey. It could take a decade, or longer. But rock is one of the most abundant resources on Earth. It could become as much a building material for clothing as it already is for architecture."

Vollebak made the Rock Jacket in collaboration with French material technologist Steven Leprizé. It builds on processes developed for the brand's earlier Wooden Jacket, a coat assembled from 250,000 pieces of laser-cut American walnut.

The elastic marquetry technique used for that jacket, known as WooWood, was adapted for slate in the new design. The precision of the tiles matters: the five-by-five-millimetre squares allow the jacket to bend.

Leprizé identified the laser cutting as the decisive step in production.

"There are 50 steps to making this material," says Leprizé, "and the cutting of the tiles is the most important."

According to the brand, the jacket challenges the idea of throw-away clothing by using a material that "took millions of years to form" and aims to "rethink our relationship with the oldest materials".

Stone is being reconsidered elsewhere in design. A high-rise block in London was recently completed with a structural stone exoskeleton, signalling renewed architectural interest in the material.

Tidball's decade-long timeline suggests the Rock Jacket is a prototype rather than a product — a first test of whether rock can move from building sites to wardrobes.